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Like many that grew up watching the skies, I have been captivated by the planets. Mars is no exception, with its striking red colour, polar caps and mysterious dark features. Many of the surface features have been driven by ancient volcanic activity but whether any geological activity moulds the terrain today is still subject to scientific debate.  A recent study however has revealed that Mars is surprisingly  active..even today!

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and has captivated our imagination for centuries. It’s often called the red planet due to the amount of iron oxide in the fine powdery, dusty surface material. The atmosphere is thin and tenuous and is believed to be unable to support life.  Numerous probes have visited Mars to shape our current understanding but this new view is quite removed from the view during the days of Schiaparelli in the 19th Century. The poor quality telescopes of the day led to equally poor quality observations that erroneously recorded a surface criss-crossed with canals from an unknown alien civilization.  

Until recently, it has also been thought that Mars was volcanically inactive but a recent study by a team led by Joana Voigt from the Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory have shone new light on the story. The team combined data from ground penetrating radar and spacecraft images to develop a new model of Martian volcanism.

The use of the ground penetrating radar allowed the team to penetrate as deep as 140 meters below the surface and construct a 3D model of the lava flow in Elysium Planitia and use it to identify over 40 volcanic events with the most recent depositing at least 1,600 cubic kilometers of molten lava into the plain. Although the team are keen to stress that they have not observed any volcanic activity but believe that Mars may be far more active now than previously thought.

The study explored a vast, featureless plain on the Martian surface (which is known to be one of the youngest volcanic regions) and found far more volcanic activity than expected.  They found significant quantities of lava that had been erupted from cracks and fissures spanning timescales as recent as one million years – geologically that’s just a few days ago.

Adding to the conclusion of a more active Mars than before is the number of quakes detected by NASA’s InSight lander in recent years. Evidence also points to a number of significant floods in Elysium Planitia and that has implications for the possibility of Mars ever being capable of supporting life. Not just floods but evidence of ‘geyser’ like hydrothermal vents all of which help to support a model of Mars that is far from dormant.

Source : Recent volcanism on Mars reveals a planet more active than previously thought

The post Mars is Surprisingly Volcanically Active appeared first on Universe Today.

Best chance of finding liquid water, and even life on other planets, is to look for the absence of carbon dioxide in their atmospheres.

Researchers have developed a high-speed, high-sensitivity terahertz-wave detector operating at room temperature, paving the way for advancements in the development of next generation 6G/7G technology.

An international research group has engineered a novel high-strength flexible device by combining piezoelectric composites with unidirectional carbon fiber. The new device transforms kinetic energy from the human motion into electricity, providing an efficient and reliable means for high-strength and self-powered sensors.

An international research group has engineered a novel high-strength flexible device by combining piezoelectric composites with unidirectional carbon fiber. The new device transforms kinetic energy from the human motion into electricity, providing an efficient and reliable means for high-strength and self-powered sensors.

New theoretical analysis places the likelihood of massive neutron stars hiding cores of deconfined quark matter between 80 and 90 percent. The result was reached through massive supercomputer runs utilizing Bayesian statistical inference.

A few weeks ago I discussed the movie “The fall of Minneapolis”, which you can watch free here. The movie maintains that George Floyd was not murdered by racist cops, but died after he was arrested due to a combination of stress, use of dangerous drugs, and heart and lung problems. Here’s how I summarized the movie at the time:

1. Floyd was not murdered by the police: he had serious heart problems, hypertension, artherosclerosis, COVID, and was high on near-lethal doses of fentanyl and methamphetamine during his arrest. He was also complaining about not being able to breathe well before he was brought to the ground by the police. Difficulty in breathing could easily be explained by both his heath condition and ingestion of serious drugs.
2. The official autopsy found drugs in Floyd’s system, confirms the health problems mentioned above, and found no evidence from examining his neck that he died from asphyxiation.
3. The [police] bodycam videos were not allowed to be shown to jurors by the judge. They show that Floyd might have been restrained simply by having a knee on his shoulder, not on his neck. This method of restraint, called “MRT” (maximal restraint technique) is taught to all Minneapolis police recruits as a way to subdue resisting suspects. (There is no doubt from the bodycam videos that Floyd insistently resisted arrest and fought the officers.)
4. The judge did not allow mention or a photo of MRT in the Minneapolis police manual to be shown to the jury. Further, the police captain, lying, denied that MRT was taught to all police officers.
5. The police called for medical assistance within minutes of Floyd having a medical emergency when he was on the ground. They also tried to resuscitate him via CPR. This is inconsistent with the narrative that the officers were trying to kill Floyd.
6. The judge, mayor, city council and police hierarchy all “conspired” to convict Chauvin and the other officers, buttressing into an official narrative that was likely wrong.

This was followed by a lively discussion among the readers, many of them doubting the evidence given in the movie.  I highly recommend that you watch it, as it makes a decent case that not only was Floyd not murdered, but the cops followed official protocol, Floyd was not asphyxiated, and that the mayor and police chief of the city lied under oath in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the accused murderer. As I’ve discussed the evidence before, you can review it here. Meanwhile, click below to watch the movie if you haven’t:

In my earlier post, I showed a 48-minute discussion between Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, both of whom watched the movie and were pretty convinced by its thesis.  Now, they’re back on the “Glenn Show” (video below) discussing the movie with its two producers, Liz Collin, and JC Chaix.  YouTube, however, put restrictions on this one-hour discussion, so Loury decided to put it on his Substack site.  If you click on the image below, you can hear that discussion for free. Here’s Loury’s explanation for not putting it on YouTube:

As you may be aware, YouTube restricted this week’s episode of The Glenn Show to viewers 18 and older. My team and I determined that the reason for this restriction was the inclusion of footage and imagery taken from the scene of George Floyd’s death. I want as many people to see this conversation as possible, and an age restriction has the potential to severely limit the video’s reach. So we decided to re-edit the video and remove the footage and imagery that led to the restriction, and then re-upload it. The conversation itself remains intact—only the visual elements have changed.

However, I found it unacceptable to simply capitulate to what I believe to be an incorrect decision on YouTube’s part. Accordingly, I’ve made the version of the video I originally intended to release available here on Substack. This isn’t the first time The Glenn Show has been penalized by YouTube, and I doubt it will be the last. Rest assured that, no matter what happens, I’ll find a way to get my show—uncompromised and unfiltered—out to you.

Click to watch:

At the beginning and throughout, McWhorter plays the role of “bad cop,” even though he buys the film’s premise. He does this by asking the hard questions that have led people to diss the movie. For example:

Was the bodycam showing Chauvin sitting on Floyd’s shoulder rather than his neck produced by AI? The producers say definitely not: AI manipulation arrived long after the bodycam videos were made public.

Why did Chauvin sit on Floyd’s neck for so long when Floyd clearly said he was in trouble? In fact, the cops called for medical help within a minute, but the emergency help bot confused with directions and took longer to arrive.

Did Chauvin, even if he didn’t intend to murder Floyd, or killed him unintentionally, contribute to Floyd’s death by sitting on his neck or shoulders?  That’s doubtful; Chauvin was unaware of Floyd’s medical condition at the time of the arrest (an arrest that Floyd fought vehemently).  Also, Floyd was crying “I can’t choke! I can’t breathe!” before he was ever on the ground—indeed, before the cops ever touched him. Further, the official autopsy said there were “no signs of asphyxiation.”

Did the cops violate department policy by restraining Floyd the way they did? No, in fact they were strictly adhering to the department policy of “maximum restraint technique” (MRT), which all Minneapolis cops are taught. The mayor and chief of police lied about this, denying that it was taught, and then someone removed the MRT pages from the online police manual.

Why did the prosecution witnesses lie, and why did they show only 90 seconds of the 18-20 minutes of police bodycam video (that video’s in the movie)?  It’s not completely clear, but the producers suggest there was a narrative that had to be adhered to and that narrative was of a white cop, motivated by racism, murdering a black man. In fact, the coroner admitted there was such a narrative and was scared that he’d be fired because his autopsy report didn’t adhere to that narrative.

Why didn’t the movie show all nine minutes of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s back/neck? The explanation is a bit unclear, but apparently the producers wanted the viewers to get hold of the whole nine minutes and judge for themselves. But where would we get that video? This is the only waffle-y part of the producers’ explanation.

The discussion ends with a bit about the interviews with the Minneapolis police officers who weren’t arrested, and who are sometimes moved to tears by what happened to their department and by the lies of the prosecution witnesses and other officials. There’s also some discussion about the $27 million that Minneapolis gave to Floyd’s family. Apparently another person arrested and subject to the MRT also sued, though he wasn’t injured, and got $8-9 million.

If you’re not in the mood to watch Loury and McWhorter yet, at least watch the original movie. But I recommend watching the original movie and the Substack discussion above.

The litany of college wokeness, and especially the harm it causes, is now being discussed by the mainstream media, including the Atlantic and the Washington Post. Here, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the most respected venue for discussing college affairs, published a long piece (ca. 6000 words) discussing how “a decade of ideological transformation”—and that means “wokeness”—is no longer off limits to criticism.

The most obvious sign of this is the congressional hearing that led to the resignation of the President of Penn, the weakening of Harvard’s President Claudine Gay, and a general tendency for donors to pull their money out of colleges because of their hypocrisy—a hypocrisy that led colleges to punish minor speech transgressions (like misgendering and “microaggressions”) but to suddenly raise the banner of free speech when it came to calling for genocide of the Jews.

As I’ve said, a decent college free-speech code—one that adheres to the First Amendment—would allow for calls to kill Jews, but only under certain conditions (you can’t, for example, do it to harass someone or create a climate that impedes education). In that sense all three Presidents were right—context does matters.  But what rankled many people, including me, was that these colleges did not have decent speech codes, and what codes they had were applied unevenly. This created a kind of hypocrisy that led to the downfall of Penn’s President Elizabeth Magill, who didn’t know how to handle the issue thoughtfully and humanely, and walked back her free-speech advocacy the very next day.

The problem is how to maintain free speech, which allows students to say really offensive things, including “From the River to the Sea. . ” (a disguised call to eliminate Israel and Jews), while at the same time preserving a campus climate that is conducive to discussion and learning. That’s a hard problem, one that I’m dealing with now and trying to solve in my own way (more on that later).

After giving lots of examples and offering potential causes of the last decade’s illiberal campus climate, author Len Gutkin offers a solution, which turns out to be colleges’ adoption of the principle of “insitutional neutrality”: there should be no official statements by administrations or departments about ideology, politics, or morality. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’ll give (indented) quotes from the article in three sections, which I’ve arbitrarily constructed.

1.) THE PROBLEM

Author Gutkin dates the problem as really beginning with the demonization of Nicholas and Erika Christakis at Yale after a dust-up about Halloween costumes. This took place in October of 2015, when Erika wrote a note to the students in her residential “house” saying that the administration’s policy of specifying politically correct Halloween costumes should be regarded with some critical judgement. The students didn’t like that, as you can see from the video below, in which they go after Nicholas like gangbusters for what his wife did.  Watch the students going wild as Christakis kept his cool. (For background information, go here or read the part on “Yale Halloween Controversy” at Nicholas Christakis’s Wikipedia page.)

The result: Nicholas and Erika resigned as heads of Silliman House, and Erika left Yale permanently.

Whether or not that marks the formal beginning of a tide of wokeness, a lot of reprehensible behavior ensued, exacerbated by the death of George Floyd in 2020 (see next post). A few examples:

An almost-random sampling from June 2020: The Rutgers University English department released a letter detailing its “actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter”; these included a “Racism in Education Reading Group” as well as workshops on “how to have an antiracist classroom.” The latter would be “mandatory for all tenure-track, tenured, non-tenure-track, part-time, and graduate instructors — everyone.” The Harvard College Office of Admissions and Financial Aid issued a statement promising, among other things, to “commit to engaging more deeply in antiracism work to support our work in admissions and financial aid and in hiring, professional development, and promotions within our office.” Cornell University’s Office of Student and Campus Life issued a statement explaining that “the institution of higher education is founded on and continues to function with intentional systemic barriers in place for marginalized people, especially our Black community members.” The president of Brandeis University promised to “transform our campus and address systemic racism” via a series of “action plans”: “We must go further than dialogue and understanding. We must rapidly move toward concrete change.”

In July 2020, an open faculty letter circulated at Princeton and signed by several hundred faculty members likewise asked that the university take “immediate concrete and material steps to openly and publicly acknowledge the way that anti-Black racism, and racism of any stripe, continue to thrive” on campus. The suggested steps were many and heterogeneous, including “implement administration- and facultywide training that is specifically antiracist,” “acknowledge on the home page that the university is sited on Indigenous land,” and “fund a chaired professorship in Indigenous studies for a scholar who decenters white frames of reference.”

. . .Indeed, in the two years following the murder of George Floyd, it became apparent that academic freedom and activist demands — even some demands backed by administrators — were sometimes in severe tension. Almost every week seemed to bring a fresh incident. Some of the cases are farcical: In 2020, a white professor of clinical business communication at the University of Southern California, Greg Patton, used the Mandarin word “nèige,” which means “that,” in a lesson on filler words (nèige can be used similarly to “um” in English but sounds vaguely like the N-word). A joint letter signed by “Black MBA students” referred to the “emotional exhaustion of carrying on with an instructor that disregards cultural diversity and sensitivities and by extension creates an unwelcoming environment for us.” Patton was removed from the course. Other cases fundamentally threaten academic freedom as it pertains to classroom teaching: At the University of Michigan, Bright Sheng, a composer from China who teaches in the music school, showed a 1965 film version of Othello in which Laurence Olivier appears in blackface. Students were upset; Sheng apologized and agreed not to finish screening the film. That response was felt to be unsatisfactory. Sheng was removed from the course. His dean, David Gier, explained that Sheng’s misdeeds “do not align with our school’s commitment to antiracist action, diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

And then there was the affair of the Yale Law School trap house. , ,

You may have heard about most of this, and the article gives more examples. But we already know about this tsunamis of wokeness, and how it’s inhibited students from speaking their minds.  Gilken has a psychological diagnosis of the problem which aligns with the one Haidt and Lukianoff offered in their excellent book The Coddling of the American Mind:

2.) WHAT CAUSED ALL THIS?

Gutkin sees one main cause of this atmosphere: the entitlement of students created by a new atmosphere of “safetyism”, itself promoted by the desire of students to have colleges act in loco parentis. Earlier students didn’t want that, but simply wanted independence. This atmosphere is discussed thoroughly in Haidt and Lukianoff’s book. A few quotes from the Chronicle piece:

When Erika [Christakis] asked her Sillimanders whether they should be more skeptical about “bureaucratic and administrative” power over college students, she put her finger on a generational rift between baby boomers like herself and the millennials she was superintending. She simply couldn’t fathom that many students welcomed the guiding hand offered by administrators at the Intercultural Affairs Council. Her own generation, after all, had demanded that college students be emancipated from the in loco parentis oversight of their elders on campus. “Whose business is it,” Erika had asked in her letter, “to control the forms of costumes of young people? It’s not mine, I know that.” Students disagreed.

. . .The last decade’s protest culture, with its emphasis on harm and care, abandons one of the central goals of an earlier age of student activism: the nullification of colleges’ in loco parentis controls. Instead, Gersen observed in 2015, students approach college administrations with a kind of “family feeling” hard to imagine in an earlier era. Of the Yale Halloween protests, she writes: “The world in which it’s not bizarre for a young person to rebuke someone for failing to ‘create a place of comfort and home,’ or to yell, ‘Be quiet … You’re disgusting!’ and storm away, is the world of family, where a child in pain desperately desires empathy and understanding from a parent.”

These psychodynamics are crossed with other, older traditions of campus protest, including the rhetoric of the left in the ‘60s. The result is an oddly psychologized species of militancy, a blend of personal insult, wounded outcries, radical political prescription — and demands that offenders be punished. Indeed, Gersen’s observation about students’ desire for familial protection from administrators should be supplemented with a complementary account of punishment. Families, after all, are where children are trained and corrected. The last decade has been marked by a decided willingness on the part of campus activists to ask administrators to train and correct both wayward faculty members and fellow students — and a decided willingness on the part of administrators to oblige them. Although the term “cancel culture” has become tainted by partisan political bickering, it gets at the broadly punitive atmosphere of campus life now.

And I like this explanation, which comes from Lukianoff and Haidt:

In 2015, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff identified a disposition they termed “vindictive protectiveness,” which combines a neurotic fixation on one’s own vulnerability with a thirst for punishing others: “The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into ‘safe spaces’ where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable [and] to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally.” The sociologists Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen can help us understand how that disposition sometimes becomes the glue holding student activists together. In a 2017 paper, “Why Punishment Pleases,” Carvalho and Chamberlen coined the concept of “hostile solidarity,” whereby punitive rituals bind groups together at the expense of the punished. This concept, they note, might “assist an analysis of why the deployment of what can be deemed a punitive logic has become particularly appealing in contemporary liberal social settings” — like colleges. As one protesting student told Nicholas Christakis back in 2015, “Now I want your job to be taken from you.”

“Vindictive protectiveness”! Yes, the combination of fragility and aggressiveness is not something I’ve seen on campuses before.  Aggressiveness, yes, especially during the Vietnam War and civil rights protests of the Sixties. But not the fragility, also explained by Haidt and Lukianoff as a result of overparenting and other factors.

But Gutkin skims but lightly another cause of campus unrest: the proliferation of DEI bureaucracies, which promote identitarianism and the oppressor/victim narrative (“fragility”) as well as divisiveness (“aggression”).  It’s mentioned only two or three times in the article; and, indeed, Gutkin may see DEI as simply another outgrowth of the safetyism dsecribed above. But the DEI intrusion into academia began well before the Yale incident, and is somewhat independent of it (the Bakke case was in 1978). And there’s evidence that DEI, by creating divisiveness, self-segregation, and inhibition of free expression, is contributing to this problem. Bolding in the excerpt below is mine:

Still, there is some evidence that the proliferation of administrative bureaucracies like the Intercultural Affairs Council stimulates student protest against certain kinds of speech, especially conservative speech or speech, like the Christakises’, taken by student activists to be conservative. A recent study by Kevin Wallsten, a political scientist at California State University at Long Beach, finds that student tolerance toward conservative speakers is negatively correlated with the number of diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators, but it finds no such effect for tolerance toward liberal speakers. By the same token, Wallsten found, the student bodies at campuses with a high number of DEI administrators are more likely than those at campuses with lower numbers of DEI administrators to support disruptions of controversial speech. The perception that some administrators are soft sponsors of student protests has, in the last year, invited intense scrutiny and even official policy revisions. In a memo issued in March 2023, for instance, Jenny Martinez, then dean of Stanford Law, included a section called “Academic Freedom, Free Speech, DEI, and the Role of University Administrators,” in which she specifically focused on the troubled relationship between free speech and DEI.

Getting rid of DEI would, I think, help reduce this kind of campus tension, for DEI sets group against group and inculcates the “privileged” with guilt and the “oppressed” with resentment and fragility.

3.) WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT THIS?

This is the hard part. If you maintain a campus policy of free expression, people are going to get offended, and, without due care, it could create a climate of fear and safetyism on campus. The sole solution offered by Gutkin—a good one, to be sure—is to adopt a policy of institutional neutrality like our Kalven Report. We’ve had far less trouble in Chicago than at places like Harvard (which bought striking pro-Palestinian students BURRITOS, for crying out loud), and although we have demands for the administration to take stands on issues or divest from some corporations, the students know that this is useless, and their hearts aren’t really in it. So yes, adopt institutional neutrality.  (It’s worth noting that unlike the Ivies, which lost big donors after the House hearing, this hasn’t happened at Chicago.)

What will they do now? One possibility: Commit to the institutional neutrality enshrined in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, which calls for “a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political or social issues of the day.” No more statements from college presidents scolding the Supreme Court; no more declarations of solidarity with Ukraine. One leader adopting this approach is Maud Mandel, president of Williams College, in Massachusetts. “Our most important mission,” she wrote to her campus, “is to teach students how to think, and empower them to do so for themselves — not to tell them what to think.” Danielle Allen, the Harvard political scientist, likewise told me that she thinks it would benefit colleges to “embrace” the Kalven Report. So did Ellen Cosgrove, the retired Yale law administrator who got ensnarled in the Trent Colbert case. Cosgrove predicts, too, that colleges will become much clearer in the future about the consequences of participating in disruptive protests.

Whatever neutrality’s intrinsic virtues, the intense scrutiny brought to bear on campus politics by Republican politicians makes it politically expedient, too. Colleges are under pressure to reverse the appearance of a political double standard on campus, and a policy of neutrality might not only remove a provocation to politicians but give colleges a tool with which to resist the imposition of a conservative orthodoxy by state legislatures.

But of course this raises the problem, recognized by Gutkin, that such neutrality doesn’t do much to dispel either the psychological tendency of students to be fragile nor the DEI-promoted rivalry between identity groups. All Gutkins can offer here is the idea that adopting the Kalven principle (so far embraced by only two schools beside Chicago) will let the air out of protestors’ tires:

If neutrality is a negative doctrine of restraint, pluralism is its positive consequence, the fruit it allows to grow. It is not conducive to “family feeling” — families tend toward consensus or else, à la the students screaming and weeping at Nicholas Christakis in the courtyard of Silliman, embittered antagonism. Perhaps, as happened after the explosive campus protests of the late 1960s, we are entering a new period of quiescence, all passion spent. Or perhaps not.

To be sure, this is not an easy problem to resolve.  But I think there are other things to do, like encouraging discourse between groups and ensuring that although speech remains free, there may be a few tiny curbs on the First Amendment that would facilitate interaction. One of these would be to prohibit shouting down speakers or deplatforming them. That is allowed by the First Amendment but is not salubrious for campuses. And it’s important that although free expression should be encouraged, students who violate campus rules via sit-ins, deplatforming, and disrupting classes with chants, be punished, and that those punishments be known to students. For without punishment there is no deterrence, and no way to curb disruption.

And that means no free burritos for those who violate campus rules!

Today we have the fourth installment of photos from Costa Rica by Ephraim Heller (previous posts are here and here). Read on to see a lovely set of hummingbird and trogon photos. Ephraim’s text is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.  Do note the Resplendent Quetzal, which I consider the world’s most beautiful bird.

The following photos were taken on two trips to Costa Rica in April and December 2023. The photos are divided into three groups: mammals and reptiles; miscellaneous pretty birds; and hummingbirds and trogons (this one). For more photos you can follow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/hellerwildlife/.

The hummingbirds are presented in approximate order of their typical elevations, from sea level to the tops of volcanos

 

Charming Hummingbird (Polyerata decora). A lowland hummingbird. In contrast to all the other hummingbirds we observed and as you can see in this photo, the charming hummers pierce the sides of flowers for nectar rather than feeding at the flower’s opening. Interestingly, I don’t see this mentioned in the online descriptions of this bird:

Rufous-tailed hummingbird (Amazilia tzacatl) at a torch ginger. This was taken near sea level, but they are found up to 1,850 m elevations in Costa Rica. They are very territorial at feeding sites, and we saw them constantly chasing away other hummingbirds:

Another rufous-tailed hummingbird:

Green crowned brilliant hummingbirds (Heliodoxa jacula) fighting over territory. They are typically found at elevations of 700-2,200 m.:

Scintillant Hummingbird (Selasphorus scintilla). Found at altitudes of 900-2,000 m. Replaced at higher altitudes by its relative the volcano hummingbird. One of the smallest birds in existence, the male weighs just 2 g (0.071 oz) and the female just 2.3 g (0.081 oz):

Lesser Violetear (Colibri cyanotus). Typically found at elevations of 1,200-2,300 m.:

Volcano Hummingbird (Selasphorus flammula). As the name implies, this species is found on Costa Rica’s volcanoes at high altitudes, typically between elevations of 2,000 and 3,500 m.:

Volcano hummingbird (Selasphorus flammula) – poas volcano subspecies (S. f. simoni). This subspecies with the beautiful magenta neck is found only in a tiny area near the Poas volcano:

Another volcano hummingbird (Selasphorus flammula) – Poas volcano subspecies (S. f. simoni):

Talamanca Hummingbird (Eugenes spectabilis). Another high-altitude hummer, typically found above 2,500 m.:

Resplendent Quetzal (Pharomachrus mocinno) – male. Quetzals are in the trogon family and are the largest trogon. Males have iridescent green tail plumes which they shed after the mating season. They strongly prefer the shade of tropical rainforests making them hard to photograph while flying. Their favorite food is small wild avocados, which they swallow whole, digest, and then regurgitate the pit:

Resplendent Quetzal in flight:

Resplendent Quetzal regurgitating an avocado pit:

Northern Black-throated Trogon (Trogon tenellus):

Collared Trogon (Trogon collaris):